The School Census takes place every academic term, so three times a year, usually in October, January and May. It is statutory data collection on individual pupils and the schools themselves. It is done for all schools that receive government funding.

What sort of information does the School Census collect?

Personal individual information on each child, including name and home address, sensitive confidential personal data like special needs, and reasons for exclusions including drug and alcohol use or sexual misconduct, national curriculum attainment levels, exam grades, and educational progress.

Since 2008, there has been a widening of information requested. Not all of this information has value for children’s education. Our campaign is specifically concerned about the new requirements for nationality/country of birth (COB) data in the 2016/17 Census.

Why was the Department for Education (DfE) collecting children’s nationality/COB through the School Census?

In 2015 then-Home Secretary Theresa May outlined proposals to be included in the Immigration Bill that would bring schools under the government’s agenda to create a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants. According to the BBC, those plans included schools withdrawing places offered to children of irregular migrant families and checking immigration status before accepting new pupils. After the then-Education Secretary Nicky Morgan expressed ‘profound concerns’, they reached a compromise, and the DfE agreed instead to collect nationality, COB and and expanded language data through schools “to improve [the DfE’s] understanding of the scale and impact of pupil migration on the education sector.” The new data collection is explicitly linked to the government’s policy to create a hostile environment for migrants, and is part of an attempt to make schools a proxy for immigration enforcement.

Were the new nationality/COB questions anything to do with school funding?

The nationality/COB questions have nothing to do with school funding. There are no repercussions for refusing to answer these questions and it is the right of all parents/legal guardians. That there is no sanction for refusing to answer was confirmed in the House of Lords on Wednesday October 12 2016, and by DfE representatives on 16 November 2016.

What difference was made by the refusal to answer the nationality/COB questions?

The DfE had told us that if there are high rates of refused/not yet obtained responses in the Census, it will not be able to use the data that it does manage to collect for its intended purpose, and will have grounds to stop collecting the data entirely.

Are there any schools that were refusing to submit nationality/COB data to the DfE?

Schools were under a statutory obligation to ask for pupils’ nationality/COB and are obligated to submit the data that they obtain. However, some schools recorded ‘not yet obtained’ for all pupils as default in response to the 2016/17 nationality/COB questions, and informed parents of their choice to provide nationality/COB data if they wished to do so. Schools still met their statutory requirements to the DfE by doing this.

Can schools ask children directly for data without consulting their parents?

This is inadvisable even for older children as they may not fully understand the implications of providing it. Although we received numerous reports of schools asking children for their nationality/COB directly during the 2016/17 Census, schools should ask parents/guardians for the data rather than children themselves.

Can schools use data that they already hold to answer the new nationality/COB questions without informing parents?

No. If schools plan to use data they already hold for purposes other than those for which it was first collected, they must seek consent from a child’s parent/guardian first.If you are concerned that your child’s school has used data without informing you, please email hello@schoolsabc.net.

Nationality/COB data is not currently available to the Home Office, but would have been had the DfE not changed its data-sharing policy on 7 October 2016 after we wrote an open letter expressing precisely that fear. However, nationality/COB data is still being collected as part of the government’s attempt to create a hostile environment for migrants, and future changes in the data-sharing agreement could see nationality data made available to the Home Office once again. It may still be used within the DfE and there is no transparent oversight or any safeguard in place.

Is other School Census data used for immigration enforcement purposes?

Yes. The DfE has an agreement with the Home Office, in place since 2015, that it will share the data of up to 1500 children a month, including name, address and school details, for immigration enforcement purposes. This is an agreement to track down migrant children and families using school records that was kept secret from parents, the press and the public until it was released in December 2016 under the Freedom of Information Act.